Marianna Crane

GUN CULTURE

It seems fitting to re-post what I wrote last year after 20 children and six teachers were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Let us not forget.

When we were traveling in Ireland this past October, our Irish tour guide told us that Ireland did not have a “gun culture” as we did in the States. Never having heard that opinion expressed before, the term “gun culture” stayed in my head.

After the recent killings at an elementary school in Connecticut, I looked up the word “culture” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, which reads in part: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; the characteristic features of everyday existence shared by people in a place or time.

Charles M. Blow wrote in A Tragedy of Silence, New York Times, that public opinion is shifting away from gun control. In a recent Gallup poll 53 percent to 43 percent opposed the ban on semiautomic guns or assault rifles.

As I watched my nine-year-old grandson’s eyes riveted to the front page of Saturday’s New York Times lying on our coffee table, his look of concern told me I needed to speak out in support of gun control. I hope you will, too.